Contributed by Ayşenur Sönmez Kara, Program Coordinator, AVACGIS & MEIS alumna, GMU
The Center launched a series of AVACGIS faculty talks this past Spring semester. Dr. Cortney Hughes-Rinker inaugurated the series in January where she presented her research on Muslim identities and the complexities of end-of-life care. In her talk, Dr. Rinker examined the process of dying, the patient/provider encounter and death, and how these processes effected the ways that patients and their care givers understood Islam and viewed themselves as Muslims. She conducted her ethnographic research mainly in the Washington, D.C. metro area with primarily Sunni Muslim patients. She shared her observations from the interviews she conducted at a local hospital. Dr. Rinker conceptualized the dying body as a site to work on Muslim identities and she argued that death and dying should be viewed as an opening and something that transcends the physical human body, rather than to an end to the body itself. Following Dr. Rinker's talk, IIIT Professor of Islamic Studies, Dr. Aziz Sachedina shared his expertise on juridical ethics in Islam. He made the cogent point that in the field of Islamic Studies thus far, the reference to Islamic ethics has been in the area of virtue ethics as inherited from Aristotelian ethics. The general perception among Western scholars is that Muslim scholarship is too legalistic and it has ignored the study of ethics. However, he emphasized that Muslim scripture regards moral behavior and character ethics to be an essential part of faith in God. And that no legal decisions could have been made without due regard to the moral philosophy of the Qur’an and Hadith in Islam. The third AVACGIS faculty presentation by Benjamin Gatling, Expressions of Sufi Culture in Tajikistan, is based on his recent book. Based on his ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2010 and 2014, Dr. Gatling highlighted the range of expressive forms- memories, stories, poetry, artifacts, rituals, and other embodied practices- Sufis employ as they try to construct a Sufi life in twenty-first century Central Asia. He argued that Sufis transcend the oppressive religious politics of contemporary Tajikistan by using expressive forms to inhabit multiple time periods: the paradoxical present, the Persian sacred past, and the Soviet era. Dr. Gatling emphasized the fact that tradition mediates all social action. Hence, his lecture showed how Sufi expressive culture enables ways of life that extend beyond interference of state security services and how time and tradition create alternative possibilities for action beyond resistance. The final presentation was given by Dr. Ahsan Butt, entitled, "Law & Order: Rebels as Judges in South Asia?". His talk covered the topic of militants groups and their governing strategies in South Asia, specifically in Pakistan. Dr. Butt discussed his ongoing research in South Asia focusing on the question of, how and why, non-state actors provide dispute resolution in conflict environments in South Asia. He talked about the idea of dispute resolution and how non-state actors (rebels) provide informal courts to local populations. As rebel groups try to create a state like authority, they challenge the state's monopoly on power and governance. Their activities,discussed in three dimensions, include using force, revenue collection, and implementing justice, in a way that resemble states’ actions. He argued that more sophisticated rebel groups provide dispute resolution and dispute resolution is deeply intertwined with the notion of legitimacy. Accordingly, this diminishes the power of the state. Dr. Butt examined four groups (TTP, LeJ, BLA and MQM) and utilized parameters such as violence, extortion and dispute resolution. To conclude his discussion, Dr. Butt emphasized the hyper-localized nature of these groups in terms of their tribal and linguistic connections and kinship network.
September 26, 2019
